Modeling on the Irish continental shelf - An Example of Downscaling Using ROMS

Marcel Cure, Kieran Lyons and Glenn Nolan,

The Marine Institute, Ireland

European seas are being divided into Ocean Observation Systems operational systems such as MEDGOOS (Mediterranean) NOOS (North Sea), BOOS (Black Sea) and our new regional alliance IBIROOS, which is the Iberian-Biscay-Irish regional OOS. The IBIROOS system is characterized by strong tidal forcing and open ocean deep water boundaries, with exchange of nutrients, momentum, heat and salt between continental shelves and the deep ocean. The configuration of the North Atlantic Current system and the position of eddies cannot be ignored even though our main interest focuses on applications in bays and estuaries which are environmentally sensitive and yet are important in terms of shellfish and fin fish aquaculture.

In this poster we will show how we have recently implemented ROMS for the Irish shelf coastal areas, downscaled from a GCM, MERCATOR. Nested within our Irish Shelf model are further fine scale ROMS domains. We will show some early results and discuss plans we have to implement a coupled ecosystem model and fine scale meteorological models and to utilize some of the new features within ROMS such as the tangent linear and adjoint methods to improve the accuracy of hindcasts and predictions, as we move towards operational forecasting with our partners within IBIROOS.